In my opinion this is the best generation of Pokémon and was also a huge reason why many people bought a Gameboy.
The basic premise of Pokémon is like it is in all their games now, there are the first generation of one hundred and fifty Pokémon, you must catch all of them and train a special 6 of them of your choice, and you must beat the best of the best the Elite Four. You will first start off in your hometown of Pallet Town, you will be able to pick from three starting Pokémon, They are my favorite starting Pokémon, Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle, I usually pick Charmander but I really like all of them. As you progress you will catch more Pokémon to add to your team and use them to get 8 gym badges from each city. You must also get HM(hidden moves) to use to get to certain kinds of areas, and that gives it a little bit of freshness to a battle, battle, and catch gameplay. Your Rival will drive you nuts on this game, he is an arrogant @$$hole that will say things that just piss you off I mean he is so arrogant, that even when you flat out beat him in a Pokémon battle, he will say you got lucky or he wasn't trying. While he is annoying he is a great character to the story and it make it that much satisfying to beat him in a Pokémon battle. (Spoiler Alert) After you get all eight badges and defeat the elite four, you will have to beat your rival in a final battle, he is super strong and you will have to give everything you got to beat him. It's a great battle and a great end to the game.
Each town in Pokémon Blue or Red, have something special to them and Kanto is just a really nice place, one city that obviously sticks out is Lavender Town, yes everyone has heard stories about this town and I think it's truly awesome, You must go into a Pokémon cemetery and send the Cubones dead mother to the afterlife, yeah I'm not kidding and this is a kid's game, and another thing this shows that Pokémon die I mean when I was a kid Pokémon never died they just fainted, like what were they thinking with this however, I do really think this is a cool dark side to this game. The Pokémon character models aren't the greatest here you have to remember that the game came out in Japan before the show did so they are definitely going to be some that are a little flawed. For eight bit this game looks really good, nice and colorful sure it looks like nothing now but for the time it had come out this may be one of the greatest eight bit looking games out there. One thing I love about this game is that there is so much to do, in each city there are side quests you must do to be able to fight the gym leader and this is good because you can make your team gain more experience before fighting the gym leader so that you will have a fair chance against them and that made this game fair and easier.
Overall this is the perfect start to the Pokémon series, in my opinion this is the best generation of Pokémon and I truly just love this game, there are so many memorable parts to the game, very memorable cities and very memorable music, sure this probably looks like nothing to people who have played Pokémon now, but when this game came out for the Gameboy it was revolutionary.